I found Blithe and it is a whitelisted semi vanilla survival server with a really talented building community. When you first log in the season 10 spawn area is already super unique and it makes the whole server feel alive.

The staff and owners are experienced and they play daily. The playerbase feels more mature and you can be social or just do your own thing. It has casual players and also more hardcore players but it is not full SciCraft levels.

The server runs on high end hosting so it feels fast and reliable. There is also a live world map you can view online and it shows players in the overworld too.

On survival they use a few plugins like an armor stand editor proximity chat and mini blocks so it feels kind of like those Hermitcraft quality of life options. They also have optional membership perks to support the team and a suggested client side modpack you can download.

There are over 250 whitelisted players and the seasons run about five months. It starts busy around 30 to 50 players then slows down later in the season. They also have a linked permanent creative server that does not reset so people can build big projects test redstone make minigames or just mess around with friends.